The Greek for the weight used to measure silver in Palestine hat is transliterated as «talents» in English in Matthew 25:15 and elsewhere in the Parable of the Talents has shifted its meaning to «special natural ability» in English based in that parable from the beginning of the early 17th century onward (see the Oxford English Dictionary ). Likewise, many other Germanic (German, Dutch, Danish, Frisian), Romance (French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Catalan, Corsican), Slavic (Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Bosnian, Czech, Polish, Slovenian), and Baltic languages (Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian) have experienced the same shift in meaning. Also, other languages have accepted «talent» as a loan word with the meaning of «natural ability» (Swahili, Igbo, Chichewa, Sesotho, Xhosa, Zulu, Yoruba, Shona).

Curiously, Luther used «hundredweight» (Zentner) in his German translation, which was a known entity and somewhat similar in weight to a talent (34.5 kg vs. 50 kg).